Shared Esse Maxim

Shared Esse Maxim

Samuel Bird

The man was hunched over with his emaciated spine allowing his spine to protrude to the point it looked like it was about to burst out. He had no shirt and pants that were clearly not the right size, covered with stains. He swayed from side to side with his hands sliding across his feet like the leaves of a weeping willow. I moved to his side to see his face. His eyes were open and rolled back in his head. His open mouth was dry as a fly flew in there, but he was not affected by its presence. Though his body was here with me, barely living, I didn’t know where his mind had gone. “Sir, are you alright?” I asked as I kept my wits about me. “Leave that fool alone.” A man said as he walked by. “He is on the stuff.” It was clear at that moment that I never wanted to be anywhere near the stuff. My heart ached for this man. Where was his father and mother? A woman walked up to me. Her eyes were a cloudy grey and she had such deep scars and wounds, whole portions of her were missing. She didn’t have the needed amount of fat to keep on alive and had another hole in her cheek that went all the way through. She coughed directly in my face as she walked closer. I tried to back up as she came right up to me. She kept mouthing words, but her wheezy breath gave no air to allow her moving mouth to shape into words. I started to watch what she was mouthing and it was a sexual favor, or rather transaction. I felt disgusted and heart broken on her behalf as I handed her a ration of food I had with me and turned to make my way through this modern metropolis. “You got any money?” A man said, coming up to me quickly. “I am so sorry, I probably have no more money than you do.” I said, thinking of the eleven dollars that were supposed to take me to my next destination. “You’re lying, man.” He said with a grimace. “No sir, I have near nothing, and need the last of it. Can I pray with you instead?” A string of obscenities left his lips until he began to move his hand within his coat in such a way to demonstrate that violence was about to happen. I puffed my chest, stood up straight, and met his loathful expression. I did so suddenly and aggressively while turning in such a way that he did not follow me. 

How could all this be in the modern age? Not in spite of, but sponsored by the great planning of dead minds that valued their ideas above God’s. Still, there was something unique about this expedition that I have remarked on since. How could these people behave like this? How could no one help them, and help them in a way that awoke their responsibility to aid themselves? Not my words, but my outlook on existence was so at odds with each character at hand and the subsidiary that it causes me great strain to consider. When there is a disagreement, what quells the anger is a variance in assumptions. When the rules of the game are set, no matter how silly and arbitrary, you and I can share our being in a world that could be otherwise, but were able to coexist in. I think other variables are at play. The assumption that a state must minimally accept that all conscious beings are effectively equal in value to each other, was conflated that no given character could be more than another. The idea that a few managerial parties couldn’t have all the answers replaced with the value of averages that assumes that people approximate something valuable to themselves or sustainable. Finally, the fallacy of including all modes of being within a society removed the individual parties to adopt something they could share. I am not saying that a society can’t fare well with different recipes and varying looking people, whoever those people need to have some sense of shared fact and meaning. In my studies, I have found that the emergence and long term perpetuance of societies are strongly correlated with a religion that gave shared meaning. You and I could exchange goods and do so with honor, knowing we stood under a God. No matter what you and I valued and to what pinnacle of our values it was, we could meet in what God valued. I certainly do not think that all such social meanings are of equal value, but I can’t see one that is necessary. However, that there are shared facts is necessary. I now posit this gently and humbly as I can’t be aware of every consequence of this assertion, but I have been wondering if there is, at best, a sort of shared Esse Maxim. 

When you go to read a book of notoriety, it can often be confusing. From secondary sources and culture, you get an emotive or aesthetic sense of what a piece of literature will be like. This is then mingled with your expectations. The reading of these famous books then comes with the letting go of one’s notions for the conversation on has with the author. Such was my experience will reading “The Analects,” by Confucius. Having a more mitigated experience with the Eastern philosophical traditions, I was expecting more similarities to the small part of the conceptual map I had looked into further such as, Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism. Here I was, finding out that I was not even close to approximating the message at hand. What was more surprising was the lack of effort Confucius seemed to embark on, to get down to properly basic facts. Rather than try to identify the bare facts of being, he took so much of the existent experience as a given and went straight to talking about virtues and persons as if he knew what those were. As the father of Esse Maxim, I was disturbed, but as a person trying to live well, I was jealous. As I read, what became more abundantly clear to me is that Confucius was not the genius artificer of a largely ex-nihilo system, but rather a clarifier of the system that preceded him. Well then, who made that system? He references people around him for examples, but he does not reference specific other people for where the values come from. I don’t think it even was a thought that was worth thinking about to him. How is this? His society had a deep systemitization to it that allowed each life to find itself nestled within its complexity. Even the thinkers were just exploring the system, and had no need to tear it down. If my society did so, I wouldn’t offer an alternative. In this, him, his people, and his people across time, were able to have this sharedness that we are after. We are beings in the world, but our mind’s have limited access to it. In as far as we can access it, it is via our Esse Maxim. However, if each being has their own, there is no series of points that our values intersect. When it comes to the meaningful, beautiful, good, or even the true, we do not have a basis to make those shared unless there is an agreed upon system that bridges our minds. We would then each sacrifice a portion of our primitive system for this adoptive one. We would then have that beautiful thought that is only such to me now: Belonging. Otherwise, we talk past each other. I think of the attempt to make a universal and multicultural society now. If it was a variance of foods or appearance of people, that could be fine. However, a world where we walk past each other and our values never intersect is one rife with vitriol ample for violence. An example that is prevalent enough to be explosive to talk about, is the role that sex, courting, and reproduction play in a society. There are a series of options available for a healthy society and a series of options not. However, even if we took all the healthy options and placed them together, we would find people violently at odds as their newfound foes went against what they found sacred. What we find in this is that a proposed shared Esse Maxim can be a series of things, but must be only one specific thing in application. 

Less in exact historicity, and more in experimental meditation, I think to those first societies that ever existed. Our organism’s wills are for itself and it’s bloodline. Outside of that, one could scarcely relate to someone that was more than what you cognate for your tribe and family. Due to the eventuality of such, at some point people began to conglomerate. The tribal and roaming social system were exchanged for an agrarian, permanent, larger, and more complex social system. Once still survived by one’s efforts, but instead of amassing resources or plucking the pathos of family, exchange was mediated by some force. This is where I get to a conceptual point that is difficult to see out of. The question of human religiosity could locate it in our minds, however I think something of complex and subsisting social system needs a God. If you and I go to do a transaction, I may desire your grain more than my cow. However, I may still prefer the cow to your life. For that reason, when you arrive with your grain, if occasion permitted it would make sense to end your life and acquire both the cow and the grain. We needed to both walk beneath the same sun and think that it’s light shown on is in wisdom and with its own imperative. I cannot fathom a society that is started without a metaphysical other entity in which we deposit or grant values such that we can interact and exchange. This is not to say that religiosity is good for this reason, as I myself do not like complex social systems, but rather to say that sharedness either takes close blood or God. If we can grant this other mind that is privileged over our own, we can let go of our independent wills and the values that bring them about. However, if we all walk around under a thousand suns or someone saying there is no sun, how can such a society persist longer than two-hundred and fifty years? We would then walk passed each other as aliens. We would gesture to the same phenomenon but our qualia or experience of it would vary and we would have no medium for our concession. To make sense of sharedness, we need to identify the parties at hand. We have the world, which while it may be dependent on mind, the facts which are mutually available for our perception are the same. We then have the different minds for which sharedness is in question. Their perception will vary on what the facts are, as well as the weight of those facts. I do not seek to answer this question today, but to identify this as the question that a social system needs to address. Going back to our ancient example, it will also be worth asking if we are inherently evil or good. I have looked into many thoughts on the matter, but none seem to ask about the grounding for that morality we allege to break or keep. What I can say of man’s nature is we are thrust into a world that makes us desperate and we are opportunistic. Love can internalize your values as mine, but love has its own process to acquire. Now that we have brought up the multiplicity of mind’s that we need to address, we need to address how we were able to get to this point. In my philosophy, we privilege the initial singular mind. I do this because of the properly basic nature of its doxis and the order of execution for its praxis. I think it is lazy and foolish to skip to telling the world who it is and what it must do, when you have not first done both for yourself. We start at the micro and then after much effort and with humility, can only then expand to the macro. To have immediately jumped to complex social systems would be to not know the parts at hand and their plight. I think of the current theory for the brain. Neurons exchange data as one part that comprises a larger system. Human systems do not operate as such, because of the non-properly basic nature of our total selves. If you and I are going to make up a system, there are going to be emotional, social, and limiting resource factors that inhibit us from being able to pass on a sufficient amount of data to each other. For that reason, I hate the word “community” as I hear it most often used. We are not a cohesive entity, but rather a series of entities that are found barely connected or similar enough to be called a people at all. Language is of course the effort to minimize the problem of other minds, but language has its limits in reference both to what it is to be human and what it is like to be human or world and mind. What we can then do is adopt a system of valuing the good, true, beautiful, and meaningful. A world where no one has to admit their wrongness is a world ready to collapse. If we had that one point of reference for all of our lives to reference, I think only then could we have a social system worth calling a “community.” What we will notice about this new category of a shared Esse Maxim, is that it does have all the qualities of the royal Esse Maxim. It is rather that each of our unique Esse Maxim’s intersect at enough points for us to have a shared world. Otherwise, violence is not only possible, but hard to critique. We can like different types of food, but we need to agree on what sorts of things are egregious enough to elicit a penalty. We can have varying thoughts on peripheral theology, but we need to both bow before the same God. Perhaps we have identical Esse Maxim’s or one’s that are at least not too at odds, but in order to be a people, there must be a certain degree of sharedness. 

A social system is run on power. However, the power that people see is a top down effort where the rulers guide the ruled. However, it is rather an adoption of the rulers' will by the ruled. Every child wonders why people allow the state to oppress them when everyone could stand up at once and disagree. Social systems afford us valuable things such as a place, provisions, people, power, problems, and purpose to live with and for. To the degree they can fulfill these needs, they are then worth that degree of sacrifice. When you see holy wars, one question worth asking is what that society was providing that made death a welcomed deal. I loathe the idea of a contract theory, but I understand the notion that a man is brought up in a society and once grown and capable of violence, evaluates if the deal is worth readoption. This is a lesson the elites of history seem to miss. If your people have access to those previously listed needs, they don’t mind if you aggrandize yourself or have a spacious domicile. What they mind is when their sacrifice is not worth the reward they are given. No man should be expected to keep alive a social system that fails to feed his body and soul. From this we see that social power is not taken by the rulers but offered by the ruled. This of course is subject to horrendous change with the advancement of technology. While I think that atomic governance should be more the case, it is clear that it is already the case. We validate our righteous kings and vile dictators with every decree we live out. As this social system is made up of human minds and organisms, it must operate as they do. The academics of my age loathe the idea of tribalism and can’t explain the idea without telling the reader how terrible it is. Rather than hate the desires of the mind and flesh, I seek to know their wisdom. My lust seeks to bring about my bloodline. What wisdom is in the idea of a tribe? Our mind has limited capacity for the amount of people we feel a proximity to. We can curse this idea and wish it otherwise, or we can ask how we can use this to our advantage. The debate in my day is globalism versus nationalism. However, as I made the system of governance atomic in the self, I similarly made the social system at hand smaller as in the village, tribe, or even family. The following idea will apply to many concerns I have, but if every ancient society through theages thought one way, and we think otherwise, I think we must tread with caution and curiosity. The global leaves out the person to participate, and the national makes powerful forces at odds to a horrendous degree. 

As we are attempting to do a bottom up rather than a top down approach to social systems, we have to ask the order we operate. After the self is the being’s it shares facts of its organism and perhaps even its mind. This is of course the family. I have said that honor is a metric I use to identify the health of a society. The other is family. The process of creating people aligns with our animalistic nature both in terms of parental instincts and childlike needs for nurturing. No bastardization of the family can accomplish what it can. Blood fights for blood. It is my selfish cause that my offspring rise up and do well in the world. What other place is love so realized? I address the family to identify the first place of shared meaning we will find. This is between the mates of paternal and maternal that lead a family. No other relationship will bridge this level of connection as animal, man, and divine. Yet, even with much effort, these mates will struggle to have their Esse Maxim’s align at all points. After a shared culture, years together, and everything invested, it is a labor of love that they embark and bridging their minds. I point this out to demonstrate the inherent difficulty we will find in making a system that bridges minds that may likely never meet. One of the best mediums for bridging meaning is via a proverbial and aesthetic method. Rights and rituals give us a pattern to make sense of as creatures that seek to bow to something. To solidify this relationship that builds a society, mates will perform a marriage. The feast and festivities, consumption and consumption all mark the point that the mates are now an entity such to start the process of being the base for all the social world. My society's dismissal of rituals and rights is demonstrative of its lunacy. Every man finds himself wise enough to make the social world after his mind, and while I am aware of its weakness, I am still a man. For this reason I imagine what possible rituals I may recommend or institute if the world was created after my own image. Similar and emblematic to many cultures, perhaps a young person marks their ascent into adulthood by a climb atop a mountain to survive and meditate on their proposed Esse Maxim until they come to the conclusion it is worthy of adoption. This then marks the point at which a being moves from benefactor to contributor of a family and social system. This now takes us to the question of the process for the distribution and allocation of values as resources to those parties deemed worthy of receiving. The sucking child is deemed worthy of receiving all its needs via the parents with no reciprocation other than the child’s adoration. However, the healthy man who works not may not be deemed worthy of receiving resources from other healthy men who labor and resent his not. Our unlimited wanting is bashed against our limited access to satiating resources. When this fact is taken into the social world, it can be exacerbated. We would be benefited to consider the existent conversation of negative and positive rights. As far as I care to understand it, a negative right is the right to not have a value-inhibiting fact come upon you. A positive right is the right to access a valued resource. The issue why we need to practice caution, is that our access to rights is at the expense of someone having access to theirs. However, this categorization allows me to make a surprisingly simple statement. I am in favor of every negative right and no positive rights. People may wonder to what extent I mean this, but I worry about what bloodlines persist in a society that incentives the least effective among us to persist and multiply. There must be a sacrificial balance of where you and I receive and expect between each other. In the larger state, I find it so, but families have a different set of rules. For the society at large, the shared Esse Maxim shall never infringe on a given person’s Esse Maxim. As I have said before, this man would be externally free, but internally convicted. Free from the people in order to be bound to that idea that leads his life. Freedom only has merit when it is freedom for. 

This socially effective Esse Maxim then has to respond to the following questions and their associated values: The epistemic, ethical and aesthetic, and the existential. In being able to do all these things and making clear rules of engagement to transact resources is a specific quality. For that reason, we will find social systems vary in the degree they are able to bring about these values. In my age, there is a social sense of this false dichotomy between neo-liberalism or else fascism or communism. These humanist methods are seen as the only social systems available, though I am troubled to know why as they are so young. I see bodies piled and minds racked in order that we may execute on these social systems. However, what I find troubling is that in the economy of ideas, they are hard to come by, but not so difficult as to leave us relegated to a duality of fraught options for centuries. Just to demonstrate that we mustn’t bash our brains against the same social systems, I came up with a few of my own to demonstrate possibilities. To introduce the idea, I will share what made it wanted. My current career works with the allocation of resources toward a gradient of valued objectives. One of the questions that is a criteria then for a social system, is the way that “buy-in” or investing into a society was needed to govern it. This came from my witnessing a part of why my society is dying is that impartial people have too large a part. However, I also thought it to be an unjust affront to the brutal freedom we are thrust into this world to make all persons required to achieve those requirements that make them “bought-in” to the society. Coupled with my evaluations of hierarchies as not only valuable but inevitable, I have devised a three rung social system. It is unashamedly stolen from my favorite organizational structure so far. I see this structure as completing the most basic and obvious of requirements that no one in my day seems to worry about. I see this this social system as one that can sustainably subsist as it is not wrought with internal forces that seek for a societal suicide. The parties involved in this social system are the citizen, the limited partner, and the general partner. The citizen receives all negative rights as they are defended from external threats and are not oppressed by the other parties. However, while I am tempted to issue this party a series of basic positive rights such as means for travel, I know that this would be a pandora's box that would lead to a toppling of the system. This citizen is not able to vote for general partners. The citizen pays nothing and gets little. The next party is the limited partner who is able to pay into the system. By buying in, they can receive a portion of partnership in the society until they reach their limit of 100 units. Each unit from 1 to 100 will get increasingly more costly than the last unit. With this purchasing, they are able to gain more voting rights that allows them to vote other limited partners into general partners as well as to keep existing general partners or else throw them out. Finally, we get to the general partner. They are able to receive 200 units of voting rights, again, only after being voted in by their limited partner peers. They are now able to vote for other general partners, and finally, the laws at hand. The system will allow for adaptation, but not outside of the given system. The system could not be voted away. For example, if someone felt bad for citizens and wanted people who were allowed to contribute nothing to vote, that would not be permitted. My harsh critiques of democracy would largely be eased here. The harpers for equality will likely complain at the role the citizen is relegated to, but I remind you that that is the fixed position for all persons who do not buy into the society. I have found that a demographic of people are not only permissive of a simple life free from social power, they prefer it. The secret is that if they have sufficient access to their needs, as we mentioned earlier, then they will be at peace with less responsibility. The average person does not want to do an average portion of a society's efforts. This is why hating greatness is social suicide, as these outliers are our force of nature. Again, the point of this system is not that we should just simply adopt it, but that the false dichotomy humanism gives us where we either destroy our people, other people, or the world, is not necessary. We will always have to pay a price, but humanism requires much and gives little. The smoking gun of the modern social system’s failure is their complete annihilation of the dance of the ages. They made this beautiful portion of the human experience the means to maximize pleasure. Means and methods allowed for my copulation and less connection. Child bearing and their care is seen as being a failure and a thing to avoid. To my distress, my society has given up on bringing up the next generation and instead is selling out so our hedonistic elders can chew up the world in their final gluttonous feast. I will never forgive my society for what it did to the dance of the ages and don’t mind throwing out a few ideas to tear it down. 

Esse Maxim has a gradient of complexity that amazes me. I can go into a deep meditation with a toolbox of thoughts and find it as being at the bottom, side, and ceiling, of every thought I structure. However, it also has its simplicity. The average person will not concern themselves with the metaphysical and epistemic underpinnings that make Esse Maxim possible and powerful. As my last spit in the face of modernity, it is just as for those simple people that need and labor, and as for the fortunate elite. To this man whose life is keeping food in his children’s mouth and little else, Esse Maxim is the vessel to the holy concept he bows before each night. Instead of asking if it is worthy of his efforts, he goes about doing his efforts and hoping he is worthy. For this reason, the simple and laborious will have more wisdom with Esse Maxim than the learned and lazy. However, I am careful to give the everyman Esse Maxim. I have seen that existentialism was seen by many as God’s death opening up the permissibility to give into their basest desires. For this reason, an idea I love, sponsored the vile sexual perversions that break my heart. The issue with existentialism is how does a multiplicity of minds exist in the same world when their ends never converge? For the complex minded, their efforts of locating and executing on the Esse Maxim can be done on their own. They knew all along every rule of a society was made up by it anyway. Morality is often the rules the elite wish for the simple. Fortunately, their awareness that they make the law as they live it is also in tandem with their recognition that the consequence of a given law will be extreme. For this reason, they can explore more conceptual territory and are also safer in doing so. However, this is where I am curious if a shared Esse Maxim for a society could give a man, as he comes into being, a series of options that can choose his adoption of, for example on that ritual on the mountain. Combined with the vital role that shame and honor plays, he will choose out that Esse Maxim that is at the perfect nexus between authentic to who he is and conducive to those lives around him. As someone I loved made a choice that was tragically destructive, I told her that her life was not her own. As she was loved, she was pulled into other minds. Those minds would be torn to see the new fact she had brought about. I am still torn at the role of “others” in selecting an Esse Maxim. To betray them in what you pick because you pretended you truly value it is vile. To betray which Esse Maxim chose you because you sought to belong is possibly worse. What I can say is one must pick that which they really and truly must. When they choose it, they can’t be thinking of what they already wanted and how to excuse it, but what was worth all the sacrifice. A hint, your genitals and belly aren’t worth all the misery your life exacts from you. To the man that attempts to do so, let his cognitive dissonance shred his psyche apart. Esse Maxim is the core of one’s highest value as one’s deepest will. It is not the fleeting wanting. This is part of my concern with democracy. The wantings you have as you fill out a ballot paper, is not the sort of thing that even on average, can result in a society that can subsist. All societies that ignore facts of self or world live out centuries long, bloody reductio ad absurdums. Perhaps, the complex minded test out and share their possible Esse Maxims and based on their success, they simply adopt them as they need fit. I am still troubled by what parameters a society should, I say “should” with caution, institute parameters for Esse Maxim selection. I am not saying this to control others, but to mitigate their ability to do so to others. If one has come by Esse Maxim well, let their society bring them to gallows or guillotine. In betraying this idea, one would leave the rest of their life a curse without redemption. Can a man’s finger point out a thousand mile journey and find its suggested trajectory exact? This is the issue with thinking of social systems. One’s thought seems so wise, but that thought is then leveraged and expanded until it makes a full world that is self-inconsistent. This is why I am so nervous to write this chapter. Will my ideas make the next horror? Did the mind’s that thought of fascism and communism know of the people that would be buried in shallow, nameless, mass graves? I do not want to make the next horror. I am also, of all people, least qualified to write this. I don’t understand a single other person, let alone a whole series of them exchanging. However, my idiocy is met with frustration that people can’t see the obvious things I do and in my being ignored I feel crazy. It happens to be, that when you divest from all parties and activities that support a society and oppress the child at the expense of the elderly, that makes a society that will be difficult in a few decades. Not only do I feel this is obvious, I am incredibly embittered that no one is standing for the children. They deserve to be brought into the world and have a chance to engage with the sort of world their ancestors did. Like every other idiot, I think I know what a society should be like. However, I think societies worth existing are not created by man, but fate. We only then identify them. I guess, perhaps I am suggesting some criteria for such a society. 

To have any social system, we are going to need each person to have some degree of obligations. These are those imperatives that one owes to another to be a member of that society and in good standing. There are a series of sorts of obligations that could make a society persist and have the members of that society content with the deal. However, there needs to be one set of obligations that that society would need to have adopted. Otherwise, you will be embittered when you help offer something without reciprocation or else wonder why someone is expecting something from you. There needs to be a degree of expectations that we share. You will note I have repeated and will repeat this point. With these obligations, we then need to ask to what parties we are obliged to act one way and not another. Someone that is smarter than me had the idea that our proximity to someone does not change our obligation. If someone is next to me, or a thousand miles away, I owe it to them all. While their case is more complex than this, I may be uncharitable in proposing the opposite. I propose that our obligation is based on proximity. For example, a non-existent person has an infinite distance from you, and you would owe them nothing. However, your offspring that exist because of you, are owed everything they need for a portion of their life. Let us consider direct theft versus fraud. To break into a neighbor's house whom you have a relationship with is more troublesome than to commit welfare fraud and receive goods at the expense of the larger social system. I am not just plucking at ethical intuitions, the reason we feel so is because the person close to us makes up that smaller conceptual tribe I have mentioned. The secret of obligation is that it is most effective when it is a pull rather than a push. If I have a sense of duty to give, I may or may not. However, if that duty is coupled by looking into the eyes of my benefactor and seeing what it does for them when I share my resource, I am much more likely to do so. As my selfish example, I am on a board that oversees a multi-facility shelter for homeless people. You will note that I do not donate to many of the other causes in town. This is in part because I get to be a part of the lives I am changing. To succeed at one’s duty, one needs to receive sufficient value from the transaction to not grow weary and jaded. To send money overseas, one finds themselves never being able to participate in the lives of the recipient. However, the issue that the opposing party will point out is that often distant people will have more needs. The degree one owes something is based on proximity by my estimation, but that is not to say a distant person would have no degree we are obligated to them. Also, I might add that it is social and not geographical distance I am referring to. If my children are fed, my neighbors have enough to eat, and a child starves somewhere, let the caring for the near then be followed by the caring for the far. Is this sufficient for those afar? Well, if the people proximate to them do the same, then it could be. I care to make this distinction because duties that are rewarded in the act via a valuable social or emotional experience, or more likely to happen. One feels more belonging and cohesion in the world around them. As Christ taught, I do some duties without being seen to show to Him and myself that I am such a person and care so. However, I sometimes do some good to be seen by others so that they will see an example, know that someone cared for them, and even to be rewarded by their recipricol love. Dry duties done make jaded people. However, investing in people is the greatest investment other than one’s Esse Maxim and self. How can one invest when the institution one invests in, doesn’t know the name that holds the social stock? I talk about that which I am passionate about, and my mind is heavily concerned with families. A society that does not care for its offspring will not only die, but it will deserve it. There is no proximity to persons that will take precedence over one’s blood. No one will ever have the right to my labor and love as my children will. If every father cares for his children the way I intend, the world will still be a tragedy, but it will be a beautiful one with whole hearts. My philosophy is wasted letters on pages until practice. If you are my disciple and abandon your children for any other cause, please rid yourself of my books as they are wasted on you. To those mothers and fathers that seek to rear well, whatever that may mean, you have my blessing as the kings and queens that rule the foundation of our society. 

In order to have a social system in the world, we have to each have a form of that system in our mind. I can’t be surprised when my society asks me to pay for what I traded for or be penalized for what I did not. The success of any relationship is expectations. This is because I can go into it, assuming the role we assign to each other, and how I can live out that role. We have talked about our social system, or as I will call it for now, the “law.” There is something that I have hinted at thus far that we need to ask about the law. We create the law for ourselves. I disagree with Hobbes for why he thinks we need to, but he is right to say we need a system to coexist in, if we wish to do so on a mass scale. Our law would then be willed to exist because of its utility. However, if we only value the law when it does what we want, it would be available for abandonment when it slightly totals less than valuable. No law or person should be thrown out because they barely break the threshold of being sufficiently useful. However, if the law is killing all of us and not proving any of these needs we have, there comes a point where the law needs to be reassessed. Christ had his own answer by saying that the law existed for us, rather than us existing for the law. What he is getting at is that classic principled/pragmatic distinction I am always working between. Is something worthy of belief because it is intrinsically so, or because of what it provides? The good, or the true? This is why an evaluation of Esse Maxim is difficult. A specific instance of an Esse Maxim can’t possess the quality of good or bad, because it is that thing that proceeds all good and bad to you. The law, as a shared Esse Maxim, would then also have this issue. When we critique ancient societies, we lazily do it from our modern framework. However, given their assumptions, were their actions consistent? We can hate the holy wars all we want because we are pacifists. However, they were clearly not. What criteria can we use, for that thing that we get all criteria? I have my thoughts, but I welcome you to consider this. At what point do we say that the law is not worthy of its sacrifice and abandon it? To have an easy and ready answer is to fail to know people. Esse Maxim has its truth claim as the “is,” but it also has the imperative as the “ought.” This “ought" entails a state of affairs that it is better to be, or at least a series of actions that are better to do. When we embark, we do so with a destination in mind. This brings us to a question so obvious, that we will feel foolish we didn’t ask it before we did. This question is, “What is the objective of our society?” Like realizing I needed to ask God’s blessing for my life mission, once I asked it, it became so apparent it was in need of being asked. Our law, as a system of what must be done, will be lower than the moral law each person carries on their own, or at least likely. However, this law would be instituted to make a vision of the world come about. What vision do we have? My society seems to have never thought of this. Rather, masses are propagandized into feeling one instance being good or bad, and then they choose it to happen or not for that reason. The obvious issue here, Perhaps the ills they wish away were a complex sacrificial cause for what they needed. When you don’t choose something, you let the devil. In our failure to make an objective as a people, we have made one of maximizing pleasure for the most people. The issue is that now we have more people than have ever lived, and they don’t want to. When one recites their Esse Maxim, the idea has an associated vision as an imperative objective. A shared one would have that same quality. 

A social system is made up of roles. A person is effectively only what they do, as we have no other access to their ontology outside of their actions. However, your role is one you are welcome to adopt or adapt. When you are with someone, you learn the game of the interaction and you play your role. You choose it or not, but you choose something. A society can utilize this to its advantage and the advantage of its members by allowing people to fill those roles most proximate to who they are. If every man must sit like so, work like so, think like so, you think you are advantaged by the monotonous conformity. However, the society is hurt by not having this man at what he can be. He still wears a mask, but let it be one that fits his face. Fate and persons often push a mask on someone they do not wish to wear. Many are villains, because they played the role. Many of these would gladly play another role if they could, though not all. Be weary of the role others place yourself and ask yourself what you evaluate it as. Do you mind being the jester or the warrior? These roles will be simplified versions of a real person, and often come from the context before us. Consider the moment of your birth. We are thrust into being, but we come into it as a beast carrying blood of a certain sort. We are also thrust into a world that has been existing for awhile before we came here, or at least it seems. We aren’t just left to wonder at being, or even to fight to survive. When you were born, you were thrust into a world and social system that had a way it was before you got here. This is the context of your life. We then need to navigate the question of how much our private and public existence is in the shadow of this context that comes before. I hate to lazily point to the “middle way” so many times in a chapter, but I am worried at either extreme. In my age, people sought to unburden themselves by the context of the world that came before. However, in doing so, they epistemically leave behind why the world is how it is, how we are, and how we and the world relate. They then find it an unknowable entity to the degree they can’t work with it. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we find someone who comes up in the world to assume all the roles of his fathers. He takes their values, beliefs, enemies, rituals, and even their wars. He forgets why he fights except that is what they do. The root of what I am asking with the degree to which we adopt the context of the world we come into, is the role of tradition. To never think a thought not yet thought will leave out the fresh blood it takes to even keep the status quo. However, To forget all the wisdom of the fathers will leave you with a baseless foundation that you circle around until you end up in absurdity. When there is a gradient of ideas and we see that the extremes are not net valuable, I think it is also foolish to assume the exact average is wisdom. This is because that average is arbitrary based on the extremes we have on either end of the spectrum. If I ask you to evaluate between spoiling your child with a full meal of cake or no meal, the answer may seem obvious that it is the middle of a nutritious and simple meal. However, if I add the extreme end of the spectrum of never feeding the child, the average would then be to feed the child some days. The average of options is not the superior, even in terms of values that are not trying to be maximized like the least amount of people killed. I hope I can remember to distinguish between these two gradients later. With this, I find myself leaning to the side of tradition on that gradient of assuming the context of what came before us. Of course, this is with the careful addition of the thought that it depends on what the tradition is. My ages progression has made it unstable such that going to what my fathers believed would lead to the insanity I am at. However, ancient traditions are more based on that tender convergence of how the world is, how it seems to us, and how we are. Whether these traditions started off as wise, those that survive are refined. Tradition is the only time that a group of people can approximate the wisdom of the total wisdom of the people at hand. What is one’s tradition and what portions are worthy of adoption. As always, we have not resigned you from having to judge, choose, and act out. However, we have been able to identify the effort at hand and what thought processes are a part of it. 

You might notice this chapter is very long. I actually started taking notes for this years ago, but the amount of groundwork that needed to be done to get to this point was immense. Even now, I am cautious to address this, but where the wise are worried to get it right, the fool goes about making it wrong. Many idiots are talking about politics, and at some point I feel I need to address it. After privileging the sole existent person and exploring their world, then building out to the idea of others, and then addressing systems for social sharedness, we are only now possibly and barely able to address the questions of the political. This is why I have previously said that politics is philosophy for idiots, because they jump past all the basic questions of being to tell others how to live their life. So far, we have touched on topics that are at the periphery of politics, we will now look at the components that comprise it, though I do so with hesitation. Once we have this law as the shared Esse Maxim we wish to institute, we need an institution. Most societies have done so via a state that is a central body that governs the rest. The institution implements the imperatives found in the law. To what degree is this institution able to judge the law and implement it? This is the question of the gradient of authority versus anarchy. In another topic I feel no one else seems to notice and it drives me mad, I see people say that something ought to be done. Some evil avoided or good brought about. That claim has its own process for evaluation, but they then leap to the stars to then assume that the state should bring about that good or forgo that evil. Perhaps a certain thing is worth bringing about, and maybe it is not self-defeating when expanded to the societal level, but it is a leap of an assumption that the state ought to bring about this change. To do so, the state needs social power and resources. In giving it such, it then can wield it as it sees fit. This then results in a whole new set of concerns. For this reason, I find myself violently on the side of anarchy as my chapter about the leviathan suggests. However, I barely care to tell you this, don’t care if you feel the same, and am under no assumption that if this was brought about it would fix the world. I come to this conclusion by noticing that an institution must bring about the law of sharedness. However, there is no necessary reason that the institution must be the state. Shame, tribalism, and violence might sound like a list of words that keep modernity at night, but they are also an example of values that bring about enforceable sharedness without a state and all that comes with it. The question of anarchy and authority used to interest me and I used to be more sure, but what concerns me now is the issue of technology. Fascism and communism came about after the industrial revolution as the states had the means to enforce and feed their machine. As of today, I live under the mercy of a state that has the technological resources to influence my thoughts, cut me off from society, or kill me without someone looking me in the eye. If I am being honest, this worries me. Now, to barely bring up the least properly basic philosophy we possibly could, let us ask after political parties. Parties are not ideologies and for that reason are not principled. I have spent many hours frustrated at a party's inconsistencies. However, if it wasn’t thought out when it was brought about, it is unlikely to be consistent when it is executed. From my experience, all the battle cries of the parties are meaningless and all are too utilitarian to pass up a victory at the expense of their values. Left and right and all that is in between is not a thought out ethical system. All it is, is people banded together to pick the way they want to be controlled to think what way is more beautiful. All parties are an aesthetic plea to what one thinks the world is. If you are oppressed by a party, fight back and be strong, but don’t worry for a moment that it is a consistent system that you go up against. 

You and I stand opposite a kitten. The cat has white fur, blue eyes, and a tail and ears with a slight toasted grey. The kitten is licking the fur on its tail. As we look down and perceive, we each perceive facts of the kitten. Our constructing mind doesn’t pull in the cat as it is, but as we are and as what we look for. However, by us finding it so peculiar the cat is here, the cat is present at hand, as if it was the first and last thing ever seen. For this reason, we have the greatest of justification between our belief of it and the fact of how it is. Our empirical synthesis via experience has helped us know the cat the best we can. We are very fortunate here as it is likely that this could have been otherwise. These are the dry facts as they exist in the world, allegedly. Let us assume we did this process as similarly as we can so there is effectively the most similar cat between our minds that is possible. The mind holds no dry facts, but our evaluation of such, and we begin to do so. Let’s say that one of us has a strong paternal instinct and the seeing of the cat awakens a sense of adoration. We may use words like “cute” and speak to the cat in a higher-pitched voice. This one of us has experience with cats, and is able to evaluate the animal from that context. Now, let us say the other of us had a mother who hoarded cats, seventeen of them to be exact. This competition not just for mother’s love, but for resources made us resentful of the animals. Now, let’s ask about this variance. How did it happen? We each have a life full of context that brings our experience’s historicity into every moment of perception. We can find this context arbitrary as it is at odds with itself and look at it through reflection, but in this moment with the feline, we have it, and it is powerful. Why is this happening? We take the four sorts of facts and associate them with the four values. The being of the cat can either be beautiful or ugly. The energies or actions of the cat can be good or bad. The cat’s fact hood in the world, becomes truth in our minds. Finally, these values and facts seemingness and its totality as an emergent property gives us the meaning of the cat. As we see the cat the same, you think we could at least agree on how the cat is, even if we disagree on how it seems to us. However, we don’t talk as things are, but as we wish for things to be. Our words are designed to convince and implore. You likely wouldn’t say the color of the fur or size of the cat. You would likely tell me about the cat as you found it, which would be your evaluation. “Oh, isn’t he just a darling?” You might add. “That creature has no decency to be licking himself here.” You may rather add. The issue is, we are coming together and have made a world that necessitates cooperation. We would need a consensus, and for such to not be at odds, to a degree. One may think the pound should have a new occupant while the other wishes for their home to be shared with the feline. We may try to peel back our context, but we are left with whoever has the most awareness and self-control to lose in an example of game theory. It is then subjective what the value of the cat is, as we are different subjects with that value. However, again, we have made a world that requires us to come to terms with values as a consensus. Let’s say one of us takes the cat to the pound, the other could be furious and seek to take commiserate revenge on the other, plus a little extra for the hurt they felt. The other would do the same, plus a little extra pain bestowed for how this pain hurt them, as we rally people together, and finally have a war that tears the whole world to the ground. Let us also look at the cats for another lesson. The two cats eat at the same bowl every day together. At first, they used to fight over the bowl. Then, one cat would have to prepare for the other cat to fight with them by fighting with that cat first. They then go through this loss process where the game theory at hand is placing them at odds in increasingly complex ways. Finally, the cats come to this nexus point in the game theory where they reach an equilibrium where aggression is beat out by allowance. The cats now eat at that bowl with no fighting or hissing. As we allow social systems time and space to reach this point, they have a stability where the game theory reaches this nexus point. In my society, there is a constant shift of the entities and how they relate. This shift makes dead-weight loss which is the value-forgone in totality by the progression. Each party tries to come to an equilibrium that is able to assume what the other is doing often via the inference of what they have done. Stability breeds stability. 

Going back to reading Confucius, he seemed to assume I knew so much of his world and mind. The reason he was able to do so, is because he had an experience of a society that had a great degree of sharedness. He assumed I knew the world as he did and shared the same values. I was jealous to think of a world where so much was connecting us. There was no need for a man to reinvent himself alone from his people. There was an ancient wisdom as tradition to fall into. Their old men were wise, of which I am most jealous. Despite creating Esse Maxim, I don’t think a man should go and make himself alone. I am frustrated I needed to. My children will have the work of their father to build off of. Our beliefs will be brim with the lessons of fate in tradition.At times, we will disagree because of the contexts and random underlying assumptions it gives us that are not only at odds with each other's ideas, but the ideas themselves. I do not think it is necessary that we have a world where all parties interrelate. However, if you must, you would need something that would bring a sharedness to our values. Hoping to not commit the fallacy of composition, I wonder if Esse Maxim being able to do this on the individual level would hint at some ability for the macro level. We would need a sense of what the beautiful world is, because we are fighting to make it. We would need to conclude a good action, so they are not canceling each other out. We would need to agree on facts as we see them, which again is just our truth in the mind. Finally, what does this mean? We are doomed to evaluate the emergent seemingness if we can’t conclude any other fact about it. To those tortured strangers I walked past in the city, I wish there was a conceptual place I could have met them in to make their lives of more merit to themselves. However, what system could connect me to these people that desperately needs connection? I am not sure we can do such without at least the assumption of being under the same divine sun. We can make up a system where we make this shared meaning a given thing. We can play a children’s game of “let’s pretend” and call it a social contract. Sure, let us agree on such a contract, but let us always agree that the contract is ours. We are in every way at odds. The remedy? Mitigate proximity. Alternatively, as families are necessary for flourishing, there may be some sharedness that we require. It is a largely baseless assertion to make any sense of a nation or state, as the atomic parts are nothing to us. However, the family can make sense as a point to bridge this shareness. We start by not being at odds with oneself. Esse Maxim is the art of bringing all our facts and values in harmony by making them sprout from the same trunk. Only once we are at one with ourselves, can we seek to do the same with others. With deep concern and skepticism, I am supposing that we could then share that Esse Maxim, and bridge our cognition to not be at odds. Under the same God, all minds touch in their synchronicity.